Hatfield Chase
| Hatfield Chase | |
|---|---|
 The South Idle Bank drain looking towards Tunnel Pits |
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 Hatfield Chase
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| Hatfield Chase shown within South Yorkshire | |
| OS grid reference | SE734040 |
| Shire county | |
| Region | |
| Country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| EU Parliament | Yorkshire and the Humber |
Hatfield Chase is a low-lying area in South Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, England, which was often flooded. It was a royal hunting ground until Charles I appointed the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden to drain it in 1626. The work involved the re-routing of the Rivers Don, Idle and Torne, and the construction of drainage channels. It was not wholly successful, but changed the whole nature of a wide swathe of land including the Isle of Axholme and caused legal disputes for the rest of the century. The civil engineer John Smeaton looked at the problem of wintertime flooding in the 1760s, and some remedial work was carried out.
Under an Act of Parliament of 1813, Commissioners were appointed, and improvements to the drainage included the first steam pumping engine. The Corporation of the Level of Hatfield Chase was established in 1862, and another pumping engine was installed. The drains ran to the north-eastern corner of the Chase, and continued to sluices at Althorpe on the River Trent. Discharge to the Trent was subsequently moved to Keadby, and the gravity drainage was supplemented by pumps when a pumping station was built in 1940. Steam engines were gradually replaced by diesel engines, and later by electric pumps. The Environment Agency maintain eight pumping stations on the Chase, in addition to Keadby, and there are a number of smaller installations managed by the Corporation of the Level of Hatfield Chase Internal Drainage Board. Some of the pumping stations are reversible, allowing water to be extracted from the drains into the main rivers in winter, and pumped from the rivers into the drains for irrigation in summer.
Hatfield Chase is roughly bordered by the M18 motorway to the west, the River Ouse to the north, the River Idle to the south, and the A161 road through Epworth and the Isle of Axholme to the east. It covers an area of around 110 square miles (280 km2), including two large peat bogs known as Thorne and Hatfield Moors, and is part of the once-vast Humberhead Levels, a wetland which originally covered some 770 square miles (2,000 km2). The Chase is crossed by the River Torne, for which a new channel was cut by Vermuyden in 1628, as part of the drainage scheme implemented at that time. Further north, the two peat bogs were separated by the completion in 1802 of the Stainforth and Keadby Canal, running in an east-west direction between the two. In the 1970s, the Chase was further divided by the construction of the M180 motorway, which runs to the south of the canal but follows a similar course.
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Wikipedia